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Jean-Simon Berthélemy

Jean-Simon Berthélemy (5 March 1743 – 1 March 1811) was a French history painter who was commissioned to paint allegorical ceilings for the Palais du Louvre, the Luxembourg Palace and others, in a conservative Late Baroque-Rococo manner only somewhat affected by Neoclassicism.

Biography
Jean-Simon Berthélemy is the son of a wood sculptor, working at the abbey Saint Martin Laon, which made him learn drawing when he saw the provisions he showed for the Arts. His godfather was the Austrian sculptor Simon Pfaff from Pfaffenhoffen. Berthélemy made rapid progress and his father then tried to introduce him to his art. Simon went to work to satisfy his father’s desire, but as soon as he had his back turned, he left the chisel for his pencils, and amused himself by copying the drawings that his father drew for him, instead of carving them.. Soon the young Berthelemy had nothing more to learn from the masters of his native town, and his father himself, recognizing himself powerless to give him lessons, sent him to Paris with his brother, a sculptor like him, where the painter Noël Hallé who admitted him among his pupils.

After winning several medals in various competitions of the Academy, he obtained in 1764 the second prize, on the subject of Kleobis and Biton driving their mother Juno Temple. In 1766, religious Vauclerc, where his father had worked, ordered him Assumption, reported work at the time of the Revolution, Laon, and placed in the cathedral. The following year, in 1767, he won the first grand prize for his painting of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot. At the beginning of 1770, he gave to the Benedictines of the Abbey of Saint-Jean of Laon a Beheading of Saint John.

This opens to him the doors of the Royal School of the protected pupils and the traditional stay in the Academy of France in Rome (1771-1774) that it carries out with his companion Ménageot. On his return from Rome, he was July 26, 1777at the Royal Academy of Painting on a painting representing the Siege of Calais. Four years later, the August 18, 1781, He was received with Apollo who directs the Sleep and Death to make the body of Sarpedon to his family as a reception piece.

From 1775 to 1789, he regularly exhibited at the Salon paintings commissioned by the Gobelins factory, works with ancient or medieval subjects, such as the Siege of Calais (1779, Laon, municipal museum).

Diderot criticized his genre more than once between the delicate grace and uncertain contours of Boucher, and the style of a more modern school, which placed painted statues in his compositions to imitate the antique, reproaching him for coldness, embarrassment of groups and ignorance of the effects of light. He however later lend to the realization of his portrait by the artist.

On the other hand, Berthélemy succeeded quite often in the kind of ceilings. He thus executed, in 1786, in the castle of Fontainebleau, in the apartments of the queen, one representing the Dawn of Dawn and the other, Minerva presiding the sciences and arts; the Book and the Attributes of the Law, the Triumph of Philosophy and the Apotheosis of Napoleon at the Luxembourg Palace (1799-1805); Prometheus animating his statue at the Louvre Palace in 1802. Painter clever in the prospect, he possessed very well the necessary knowledge to produce the illusion suitable to these kinds of works. He is solicited by a large private clientele. Only one decoration still exists today, that of the hotel Saint – Florentin, in Paris, dated 1769.

When the Revolution broke out, he had all the trouble in the world to be paid an Assumption he had just finished the abbey of Sauvoir-sous-Laon about to be closed by the decree of suppression of religious houses of the Constituent, while his mother and sister were his responsibility. Favorable to the Revolution in the discussion, get away and stands away from the artistic life, when he saw the excess. The only official function will be that of draftsman of the Opera costumes from 1791 to 1807.

In 1796, during the Italian campaign, he was named, along with his sculptor friend Moitte, and the scientists Monge, Berthollet, Thouin and Labillardière, all four members of the Institute, following General Bonaparte within of the Commission for Science and Arts responsible in particular for selecting works of art that can be transported to France. On his return from this mission, he was appointed, with Moitte, director of the Museum Central des Arts.

Appointed professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris onDecember 20, 1805, first appointment, he will have for successor Gérard.

In 1808, Denon, then director of the Napoleon Museum, entrusted him with the execution of a painting for the Diana Gallery, on the subject of Bonaparte, general-in-chief of the Egyptian army, accompanied by his staff and some members of the Institute, visiting, after passing the Isthmus of Suez, the Fountains of Moses. This canvas figured with honor at the exhibition of 1808, when the Emperor told him, with astonishment, seeing it: “I thought you painted only cupolas? “He was confused, did not know what to answer and was convinced that he had incurred the displeasure of Napoleon.

If Jean Simon Berthélemy is a painter of history and ceiling, it is also a fine portraitist. He left posterity the last portrait of Denis Diderot, painted shortly before the death of the philosopher in 1784, preserved in the Carnavalet museum in Paris. Berthelemy ended its existence in the slot he occupied since 1806, the palace of the Four Nations, then the translation of the academies in the building.

Works in public collections

Besançon, municipal library:
Villa Adriana (?), Drawing;
Temple of Vesta or Sybille, at Tivoli, drawing;

Besançon, Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology:
Alexander the Great and his physician Philippe, drawing;
The Nurse of Nero pouring the ashes of this prince into the tomb of his ancestors, drawing;

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Châlons-en-Champagne, Notre-Dame-en-Vaux collegiate church: L’Assomption, oil on canvas;

Dijon, Magnin museum:
Apostle study; Old title: Figure of old man, drawing;
Female figure, drawing;
Portrait of Cheron in consul’s costume, or Portrait of an actor (old title), oil on canvas;

Douai, museum of Chartreuse: The Constance of Eleazar, oil on canvas;

Fontainebleau, national museum of the castle of Fontainebleau:
The Dawn of Dawn, oil on canvas;
Minerva presiding the Sciences and the Arts, oil on canvas;

Langres, Saint-Didier museum: Apollo and Sarpedon oil on canvas;

Laon, Notre-Dame cathedral: Assumption, two oils on canvas;

Laon, museum of art and archeology:
sketch of Napoleon at the fountain of Moses, oil on canvas, sketch;
Religion and Humanity uniting to relieve suffering, oil on canvas, sketch;
L’Assomption, oil on canvas, sketch;
The brave action of Eustache de Saint-Pierre at the siege of Calais, oil on canvas;

Paris, National School of Fine Arts: Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, oil on canvas;

Paris, Carnavalet Museum: Portrait of Denis Diderot, 1784, oil on canvas;

Paris, Louvre Museum:
Napoleon Apothéose 1 st, oil on canvas;
Man trained by Prometheus and animated by Minerva, oil on canvas;
Italian park corner, drawing;
The Psammetic Experience, king of Egypt on primitive language, drawing;
French Protector of the Arts, drawing;

Saint-Quentin, Antoine-Lécuyer Museum: Portrait of Jacques François Laurent Devisme, oil on canvas;

Tours, Museum of Fine Arts: Manlius Torquatus condemning his son to death for having, despite his defense, engaged in a singular battle before the battle, 1785, oil on canvas;

Versailles, Museum of the History of France:
Entry of the French army in Paris. April 13, 1436, oil on canvas;
General Bonaparte visits the fountains of Moise, December 28, 1798, oil on canvas;

Musée des beaux-arts Cambrai , The fainting of Esther, 1768, oil on canvas

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